We should understand “design” as a discipline enabling designers to invent creative solutions in order to solve issues. We are used to say that engineering focus on technical problems, and that “design” focus on human issues. From there, there are thousands of different design practices : some design products - industrial design -, others design apps - digital design -, sounds - sound design - or food - culinary design -, for example. It is about adapting a solution - an idea, a technology, etc. - in a human context which contains social, cultural or economic constraints. It is like thinking as a sociologist - knowledge - and acting like an engineer - tools -. To do so, designers use specific tools and methodologies. To illustrate this way to imagine tomorrow’s products or services, we decided to share our methodology in the following part “design methodology”. Enjoy !
Setting up a design&science approach
Getting through iGEM’s experience and working on Æther’s project is a way to experiment new approaches of our future jobs, far away from the traditional laboratory, design studio or lawyer’s office. As curious students, but also as citizens living in a complex world, we strongly believe we could play a role in solving tomorrow’s big issues.
We feel concerned about environmental, health and social issues. We also think major innovations in these field will emerge from the meeting point between disciplines : at the frontier of science, engineering and design. Thus, in order to propose a relevant and realistic response to a contemporary issue, we have endeavored to design and maintain strong interactions between our skills, knowledge, methods and tools all along the project, from Ideation to the Prototyping of a product and a service based on an app.
Ideation
Ideation is a key factor to design successful projects and innovative ideas. As we are a multidisciplinary team, we used specific tools (brainstorming, mapping tools, ideation tools, post-it sessions, etc.) to communicate between us. They are common tools for designers, engineers and scientists, helping us to mix our skills in order to :
We feel concerned about environmental, health and social issues. We also think major innovations in these field will emerge from the meeting point between disciplines : at the frontier of science, engineering and design. Thus, in order to propose a relevant and realistic response to a contemporary issue, we have endeavored to design and maintain strong interactions between our skills, knowledge, methods and tools all along the project, from Ideation to the Prototyping of a product and a service based on an app.
-identify contemporary major issues ;
-imagine biological solutions ;
-create products and services using these biological solutions to solve previously identified issues, taking into account social, economic, cultural, ecological or technical aspects, amongst others.
These exercises led to schemas and maps : a starting point to draw innovative ideas through sketches. Thus, we decided to focus on air pollution and we started to imagine different ways - scenarios, materials, products, services - to fight it. This choice - air pollution -, comes from a twofold observation :
-First, we understand outdoor/indoor air pollution as an issue to solve thanks to design and science : it causes major health issues all around the world. There is no frontier to stop airborne pollutants and we are all exposed to it.
-Then, we understand air pollution as an opportunity for sustainability : pollutants can be degraded and recovered into useful raw materials - such as metals - we could use to feed industries, rather than using non sustainable extraction/transformation processes, harmful for the environment.
From there and thanks to the tens of ideas we had, we jumped to the next stage : research.
RESEARCH
After selecting the more relevant ideas regarding air pollution, we started to :
-meet with experts ;
-identify related literature ;
-meet and question potential users through - meetings, surveys - ;
-look for past and present solutions and to identify their limits ;
-identify the codes - semiotics, signs, ergonomics, shapes - induced in health related products.
Finally, all these steps led us to understand the context in which we would use our device/service. Analyzing the existing products led us to identify opportunities to create the more relevant product and service regarding the context and the User. This analysis let us think that creating an affordable, energy self-sufficient and efficient product as well as a user-friendly service would be way for mass adoption that would benefit health in our societies.
